Iran: Political Prisoner Mohammad-Reza Pourshajari’s Life in Grave Danger by Mitra Pourshajari

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4162/iran-mohammad-reza-pourshajari The authorities are refusing the transfer of Mr. Pourshajari to a medical facility and are depriving him of all his medications, in the hope that he will soon die. “To [the prison authorities], the doctors’ opinions are of no importance; they completely ignore them…. All Iranians are forced to obey and do whatever pleases […]

Iran’s Silent Executions by Mitra Pourshajari

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4164/iran-silent-executions “It is the other prisoners who should be upset that they are housed with your father.” — Iranian judge, speaking of political prisoner Pourshajari. Right then and there, right in front of me, he sentenced some people to death. Sadly manyw ho call themselves human rights advocates, who should be defending every innocent person, […]

CAROLINE GLICK: IRAN’S BOMB IN THE BASEMENT

http://carolineglick.com/irans-bomb-in-the-basement/

It is happening in slow motion, to be sure.But we are witnessing how a nuclear armed Iran is changing the face of the Middle East.

For years, US leaders, including President Barack Obama, warned that a nuclear armed Iran would spark a regional arms race.And this is happening.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens (a former Jerusalem Post editor in chief) noted this week, Turkey signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Japan that includes “a provision allowing Turkey to enrich uranium and extract polonium, a potential material for nuclear weapons.”

Saudi Arabia has long had a nuclear cooperation deal with Pakistan, whose nuclear weapons program the Saudis financed. Jordan and Egypt have both raised the prospect of developing nuclear programs.

And in 2007, Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear installation built for it by North Korea and paid for by Iran.
In his article, Stephens cited a recent report by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board stating that the world is entering into “a new nuclear age” that, as we see is characterized by everyone, including non-state actors, seeking to develop and proliferating nuclear capabilities.

RESEARCHING AND LISTENING TO HISTORY: CONTINUING THE DIANA WEST BOOK DISCUSSION- MAX FRIEDMAN

( Friedman was a former VN/Cambodia journalist for Human Events weekly, 1970)

Diana West’s book “American Betrayal” has sparked a lot of controversy among conservative historians and I would like to put in my two sense because I have been studying the issue of Communist/Soviet penetration of our Government, especially in the 1930’s and 1940’s, for a long time. I’ve been lucky because I have met a few of the people who helped to break the Alger Hiss story, as well as to expose Communist Party USA operations and individuals both within the government and without.

For that reason, I would like to do some highlighting of such contacts because it shows how extensive the Communist issue has been on my life.

I met and heard Whittaker Chambers speak shortly before he died. I actually talked to him (I was about 16 at the time). I also met the late Isaac Don Levine, an American journalist who covered the Russian Revolution of 1917, and who later took Chambers to meet presidential advisor A.A. Berle, in the White House, to have Chambers reveal directly to him what he knew about Alger Hiss as both a Communist Party member and as a Soviet spy.

· As a counter-balance speaker to Chambers, our boys club advisor brought in a local ACLU attorney who promoted a book entitled “The Un-Americans” by Frank Donner. It was a leftist attack on Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and other Communist Party defectors, as well as on the FBI, CIA, congressional investigative committees and private groups who did research on communism.

What the speaker did not say, or perhaps did not know, was that Donner was a deep cover Communist Party USA member, who worked in the Party’s security apparatus along with Frank Wilkinson, once a California government employee who went to jail for perjury. Donner eventually emerged as the ACLU’s man heading a “Surveillance Project” at Yale.

· I also have met and questioned both of the theoreticians of the CPUSA (Herbert Aptheker) and the Trotskyite “Socialist Workers Party” (George Novak, once a secretary to Leon Trotsky in Mexico). Both polite but shallow ideologues at best.

I was proud to have been mentored in internal security by the late Herbert “I Led 3 Lives” Philbrick, the FBI undercover agent, and the late Herb Romerstein, a former very young member of the CPUSA, then an Army veteran of the Korean War, a state investigator specializing in Communist penetration of education, and then a government analyst and investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its successor, the House Internal Security Committee. He also worked for the House Select Intelligence Committee and the State Department’s section on Soviet Disinformation and Propaganda operations.

Stan Evans published my first monograph in 1976, as part of the American Conservative Union’s ACU Education and Research Institute (“The Meaning of the Bicentennial: Volume One – The Peoples Bicentennial Commission). He also served as an editor of “The Pink Sheet on the Left/American Sentinel” while I was an Associate Editor, writing on internal security and terrorism matters.

Both Evans and Romerstein wrote several books within the past 2-10 years dealing with Soviet penetration of the U.S. Government. Diana West’s book “American Betrayal” looks like a continuation of the last Evans/Romerstein book “Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government”, Threshold Editions, 2012.

The Islamic Grinch Who Stole the Olympics Posted By Nonie Darwish

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/nonie-darwish/the-islamic-grinch-who-stole-the-olympics/print/ Coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, has so far been over-shadowed by the threat of terror from Islamic jihadists. Cursing videos posted on the Internet by jihadists promise that the “demon Olympics” will have an “atmosphere of fear and terror” and tell the athletes that “Satan is with you.” Even Egyptian-born […]

What World War I Did to the Middle East By Bernhard Zand See note please….

THE ABSOLUTE BEST BOOK ON THIS SUBJECT IS DAVID FROMKIN’S A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE
Product Details
A Peace to End All Peace, 20th Anniversary Edition: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern… by David Fromkin (Jul 21, 2009)

World War I may have ended in 1918, but the violence it triggered in the Middle East still hasn’t come to an end. Arbitrary borders drawn by self-interested imperial powers have left a legacy that the region has not been able to overcome.

Damascus, year three of the civil war: The 4th Division of the Syrian army has entrenched itself on Kassioun Mountain, the place where Cain is said to have slain his brother Abel. United Nations ballistics experts say the poison gas projectiles that landed in the Damascus suburbs of Muadamiya and Ain Tarma in the morning hours of Aug. 21, 2013 were fired from somewhere up on the mountain. Some 1,400 people died in the attack — 1,400 of the more than 100,000 people who have lost their lives since the beginning of the conflict.

Baghdad, in the former palace quarter behind the Assassin’s Gate: Two years after the American withdrawal, Iraqis are once again in full control of the so-called Green Zone, located on a sharp bend in the Tigris River. It is the quarter of Baghdad where the Americans found refuge when the country they occupied devolved into murderous chaos. Currently, the situation is hardly any better. On the other side of the wall, in the red zone, death has once again become commonplace. There were over 8,200 fatalities last year.

Beirut, the capital of Lebanon that is so loved by all Arabs: The city has long been a focal point both of Arab life and of Arab strife. The devout versus the secular, the Muslims versus the Christians, the Shiites versus the Sunnis. With fighting underway in Libya and Syria, with unrest ongoing in Egypt and Iraq, the old question must once again be posed: Has Beirut managed to leave the last eruption of violence behind or is the next one just around the corner?

Boycotters’ Contempt for Ordinary Palestinians : Nick Gray

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4698/boycotters_contempt_for_ordinary_palestinians Though they will deny it, their actions speak louder: BDS campaigners simply do not care about the circumstances, hopes and dreams of ordinary Palestinians The curious case of SOS – Scarlet, Oxfam and Sodastream – has enabled us to hear something almost totally inaudible most of the time – the voice of ordinary Palestinians. […]

STEVE APFEL: JEWS ON THE DUMB LEFT SIDE ****

In a piece on the Left which is sure to stir the pot, Steve Apfel wonders aloud on how and why some Jewish Leftists adopt a position on Israel that, for all the world, could be seen as quintessentially dumb! http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4696/jews_on_the_left_take_the_dumb_side Intellectuals are people given to thought and reason. From Abraham onwards Jews have been […]

ANDREW ROBERTS: AT A UN PEACE DEBATE WAR BREAKS OUT

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303942404579363034077271104?mod=Opinion_newsreel_7 As a young man 30 years ago, I used to fear that the United Nations might in my lifetime pose a threat to the nation-state. A uniglobal, world-government movement that promised to abolish war might, I worried, destroy national sovereignty in the name of an amorphous appeal to “the brotherhood of man” or “our […]

DAN HENNINGER: SCUZZWORLD

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304428004579355333175445194?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Justin Bieber. Miley Cyrus. Lindsay Lohan. Lady Gaga. Snooki. Maybe the answer is to stop paying attention. I have artist friends who say they spend all day in their studios working on art and listening to pleasant music. If you ask them, “So what do you think of the Justin Bieber mess?” they’ll say, […]